Top Dem applauds McConnell move

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) offered support Tuesday for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) decision to divorce measures attacking President Obama’s immigration actions from a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security.

Hoyer applauded the strategy, which could provide a path for preventing a shutdown of the DHS, though he qualified his support by noting that McConnell has yet to introduce a clean funding bill.

{mosads}“If McConnell does carry that out I think that he will find an overwhelming support for the DHS funding bill,” Hoyer said. “He’s doing what they said they would do; hopefully the House would follow suit.”

Hoyer declined to weigh in on the question of whether Democrats would support a short-term extension of DHS funding at current levels, which is one option Republicans have to buy more debate time without shutting down the agency.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.

McConnell launched procedures late Monday for a stand-alone vote on the immigration proposals, which could set the stage for a separate vote on a clean — or cleaner — DHS funding bill.

Hoyer said the GOP’s effort to tie immigration provisions to the DHS proposal runs counter to Republicans’ campaign vow, espoused in their 2010 Pledge to America, not to attach controversial riders to must-pass bills.

“It is extraordinarily irresponsible to again create — create — a crisis by threatening to do what the Republicans said they would not do, and that is trying to bludgeon the president of the United States,” Hoyer said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

Hoyer then quoted from the Republicans’ pledge, which includes a section vowing to “advance legislative issues one at a time.”

“We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with ‘must-pass’ legislation to circumvent the will of the American people,” Hoyer read from the document. “Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time.”

“They have not done so,” Hoyer said.